How Long Does Your MacBook Pro Battery Last?

Have you ever wondered how long your MacBook Pro or MacBook battery really lasts? Apple usually advertises their laptops as having “all-day battery life”, but has that been your experience in practice?

Wonder no more! We’ll show you how to check how long your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air battery is actually lasting so that you can see exactly how much time you’re getting out of your Mac laptops battery. Whether you have all-day battery life, something more, or something less, you’ll be able to tell.

Note we are looking to get the actual amount of usage time that a MacBook battery lasts, not just an estimate of time remaining (which was strangely removed from macOS Sierra, though you can get that back if you want to).

To accurately get the amount of time a MacBook Pro or MacBook battery is lasting, you’ll need to use it on battery power from a full 100% charge until it’s nearly discharged, somewhere between 1% and 5% of battery remaining usually is sufficient. Just use the computer as you normally do, doing tasks you normally do, then when Mac OS alerts you that the battery is about to run out, it’s a good time to check how long it has lasted for.

How to See Time on Battery of MacBook Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air

When the battery level is somewhere between 1% and 5% you can get an exact amount of time the battery has lasted to that point, giving you a good idea of how long the laptop battery lasts in general, you can check this in just about any version of MacOS or Mac OS X:

Use the laptop on battery power until the MacBook battery is going to die soon

Open the “Applications” folder on the Mac and go to “Utilities”, then launch “Activity Monitor” (alternatively you can hit Command+Spacebar and type Activity Monitor to open from Spotlight

Go to the “Energy” tab of Activity Monitor

At the bottom of the Energy screen find “Time on battery” to see how long your Mac laptop has been running on battery power

In the example shown here, my several month old MacBook Pro 15″ model is achieving a little over 3 hours of battery life in my own real world usage before it’s needing to be plugged in again to recharge, but the numbers will vary widely depending on what you’re doing on the Mac laptop, how old it is, and what the condition of the battery is.

“All-Day Battery Life” versus personal experiences

Apple promotes the latest MacBook Pro to have “impressive all-day battery life” on their website, and they have used similar language to describe other recent model MacBook Pro and MacBook computers as well.

My personal experience with this particular MacBook Pro is the “all-day battery life” is usually more like “all-morning battery life”, and with a not particularly aggressive morning routine of fairly heavy web usage, text editing, messages, and roughly 70% screen brightness, I routinely get about three hours out of my MacBook Pro before it’s needing to be plugged into a wall again. This computer is a few months old and the battery currently has 141 cycles on it (you can check battery cycle count on a Mac easily if you’re curious about yours).

The discrepancy between the “all day” advertising and my own experience could be some quirk of my particular Mac laptop, my particular usage, or maybe it’s just how long the battery lasts for me. Obviously everyone will have different battery experiences and expectations, and each computer is going to vary a bit depending on how it is used and it’s age and condition.

This isn’t meant to be a complaint by the way, it’s just an acknowledgement that my particular MacBook Pro is fairly dependent on a wall charger. Prior Mac laptops of mine have had batteries which lasted much longer and many well into 6 or 7 hours with similar usage, so perhaps the 15″ screen just eats up a lot more energy, and my usage would need to be modified to extend battery life to reach better numbers.

So, how long is the battery on your MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or MacBook actually lasting? Use the laptop on battery power until it’s near done, get the time on battery number, and share your battery times in the comments below!

76 Comments

Definitely not the battery life of the 2013 I had…I went through weeks of trouble shooting, with and with out Apple, they finally gave me a new computer saying it was probably a software problem. Well? Not seeing much difference at all…..advancing in technology is not always wise. Too smart, and you’re drained more easily. What a metaphor. Old school = best school IMO

work on MS office products and barely get 3 hours battery. If any attorneys are reading this.. CLASS ACTION? I actually sent my MacBook (late 2017) back to Apple to replace the battery and they say “no problem found”. Okay so if that’s the case, clearly the “all day battery” is false and misleading advertising.

hi I have new MacBook Pro (2016) model with touch bar ……I am facing battery drain issue on it ,……I streamed a movie online for 2 hours and the battery drained was 40% …..and when I usually stream a video on youtube ….it takes 3-4 mins to drain 1% battery ……..I wanted to know that is it a normal behaviour ?

Can still watch 2 full length movies on DVD or local HD, in a darkened room. At least 1 full movie on Netflix, and then some. About 4-5 hours internet use on Safari at 50% screen. I avoid it, but I sometimes go all the way down to 2% when I’m too lazy to get up, but I normally plug in at about 20%.

Wife has almost the same computer, late 2012, its battery is just over 1000 cycles and says to be replaced soon. We are both running OSX Sierra each with Seagate 1TB SSHD’s.

Now I know the same computer a year or so later can be made with parts from different suppliers, and from different batches and materials. My laptop came out with a Seagate 500GB HD, but wife’s laptop came out with a Hitachi HD, which crashed a few times. I replaced my HD just for more space. We both still have the original 4GB RAM’s, but they are not from the same supplier nor do they have the same speeds.

With all this said, I don’t hold Apple accountable for not stating real life statistics in their sales pitches, they do say in the fine print that these numbers are averages generated mostly in the lab, or something to that effect.

It also depends hugely on how you use your device, we all know this. However, Apple does guarantee their stuff which is kind of like them admitting that sometimes things don’t work as advertised, because they used a different supplier etc.

I conclude this novel by saying I’m as happy as a pig in a pit with Apple products :-)

I have a 2008 Unibody Macbook Pro 15″
I have 193 cycle counts and I’m lucky for it to last 30 minutes on battery, doing nothing but reading articles in safari.
I’ve read some reviews of the aftermarket batteries and haven’t heard anything good. It’s hard finding an OEM one for something this old.

I just got the 2016 13″ MacBook Pro 2.9, 16gb and I am quite impressed with the duration of the battery.
Activity monitor shows 4:34 on battery and I now still have 47% available. I am on High Sierra. I hope it keeps running well like that..

i just got the new 2017 mbp 13 inch base model, and the battery is amazing. Ive used it all day (around 5 to 6 hrs screen on) and its still on 66% from 100%. if the battery life doesnt degrade then its the best ever.

OK, so I exchanged the laptop for another one with the same specs and it had the same problem of the battery dying in under 3 hours. I did some research online and it turned out that it is doing it because of the Radeon graphics card that was being used to run some of my applications. And even after the application was no longer running, the OS did not switch to more power efficient Intel graphics card.

Turns out there is a utility that lets you switch between graphics cards manually. It is called gfxCardStatus and installing it I was able to manually switch the graphics card and the app actually shows you in the menu bar what graphics card is being used. I highly recommend this utility to anyone with the new MacBook Pros with high end graphics cards. It can be downloaded here: https://gfx.io

I have a 13 MacBook Pro 2016 which I’ve been using for about a month now, I still get between 8 to 11 hours with light use and very light use. and my heavy use is when I use my IDEs so I get 6-7 hours on that.

I have a late-2013 MacBook Pro Retina which has 1,320 cycles on the battery. With the screen set to about 80% brightness, and my normal workload which includes having Bluetooth turned on, I average about 4.5-5 hours of usage off the battery.

69 hours on battery?? i plug in my laptop to an lg 5K monitor most days at work that both displays and charges. most evenings i come home with 100% battery, as I did last night. why would it say 69:40 today?

Thanks for all those replies. I think I will keep my ‘old’ early 2013 MPB 13″ I still get 4-5 hours out of it and that is normally running fairly intensive software like light-room with a portable hard drive plugged in.

‘All day battery life’ has been total BS for me. I have a brand new 2016 MacBook Pro with the touch strip which I’ve had for less than 2 months. Today I got less than 5 hours out of it with only Safari and Mail running… with the screen at about 70%.

well not too many positive feedbacks here, The good thing about the newer MB (intel) is the battery can be replaced easily compared to that silly coin slot mechanism on those older powerbooks that broke. My 2010 MBA battery and system runs much better with Mountain Lion than mavericks and beyond, 3.5 hours more. Apple is not fixing this old mac-new OSX battery issue, and most stores do not offer older OSXs and develop new products working with 10.8.5 and beyond-which is a shame.

According to Apple the batteries on my Mid 14 13″ MBPr (which I was unaware of), are not replaceable. After investigating, I find that they can be replaced, somewhat of a difficult job, but replaceable nonetheless. The device tear down site, ifixit.com, has the guides to do the job.

My understanding of it is the batteries are glued in, not a simple remove some screws etc. In fact I just looked at the guide, a 32 step process that they rate as “difficult”. There are six cells and are glued to the upper case. The glue adhering the cells must be heated and softened. They sell a gadget, that you heat up in the microwave, then place on the cells to soften the glue. Then use spuders and plastic cards to seperate the batteries from the case. Very nice guide, check it out: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Display+Mid+2014+Battery+Replacement/27832

i apologize, i was reporting my experience with replacing a MBA 2010 battery(a san alternative to buying a new MBA
– jeez, apple is out of hand controlling how users use products that they supposedly own. if i can’t fix something myself, i am not purchasing the product.

For a normal, dayly use of Mail, Firefox, iTunes, HTML coding, Pages, Numbers, etc., the battery (6 years old; at 79% of its design capacity) lasts 4-6 hours. It drains very quickly if I need to rip a CD or reencode a movie, however.

Hello, my Mid 14 13″ MBPr is showing 8:20 remaining on the battery icon in the menu bar, and 8:27 in the energy tab of activity monitor with 100% charge. The battery shows 257 cycles. Every Monday I let the battery drain to 20%, all the other days it’s on the charger, but unplugged at night. But have not actually measured the battery time during a day. I have swapped over the battery menu to get the remaining time on the battery icon.

That’s really fantastic, I wonder if you use Chrome or Safari for the web?

I don’t know why but every Chrome tab or window for me sits at 8 to 10% CPU so if you have a couple Chrome tabs open the computer heats up fast and it drains the battery. I have updated to the latest version but it still does that, can’t figure it out why. I like Chrome more otherwise, but it is heavy energy user.

I can’t get longer than 3.5 hours out of my MacBook Pro 15″ and I use screen brightness at 50%, minimal Safari with ghostery, and Terminal for administration. In fact I right now have brightness at 50% and those two apps open and it tells me I have 3:12 hours left at 80% battery charge.

All day battery? Ha, typical Apple marketing of extreme hyperbole that does not match to reality.

You should try and install https://gfx.io/ it helps you control manually what graphic cards it uses. The Macbook Pro 2017 can only reach a better battery life only when it is using the integrated graphic card, however, once it switches over to the Discrete graphic card, the battery life decreases significantly.

My 2015 MBP averages 2.8 – 3.3 hrs with email usage and video streaming activity. I have never had more than 3.5 hrs. My MBAir can get 3 – 6 hrs depending in what I am doing. But usually around 3-3.5.
But compared to my Toshibas with Windows? I will take Apple any day of the week!!

You should keep an eye on what graphics card you’re using with the apps on your workflow. I noticed that Adobe PDF Reader uses the dedicated graphics card while reading some text only technical papers – this will reduce your time on battery significantly.

Anybody have a take on bluetooth? I had the watch unlock feature on my 13” rMBP (2013) and I noticed the battery didn’t last that long.

I have a MBP 13″, late 2012 and have been having battery problems. Charge is typically 3 hours, but the indicator still tells me it’s 50% charged when it shuts down. I’ve tried recallibrating the battery but that didn’t work.

Beverly, I was quoted £280 for a battery replacement by Apple. But check your specific model.

My macbook 12 inches 1.2Ghz m5 512 SSD lasts like 6-7 hours. Mostly I use chrome doing daily tasks like watching video trainings, doing zoom meetings plus facebook, gmail but I use an extension called ONETAB. I like my macbook since battery lasts long plus its fast and very light.

My MacBook Pro runs quite warm anytime Chrome is open, and a lot cooler when Safari is open. Longer battery life with Safari too, but Safari has a fatal bug (still in 10.12.4, likely to never be fixed knowing how things work in Cupertino today) that causes the entire system to crash and melt down and the only solution is rebooting every day or so which is very annoying. Pick what annoys you more I guess?

Anyway I get about 3-4 hours with Chrome, 5.5 hours with Safari. Same Mac as you.

I have a 2013 mac book pro which is now entirely dependent on power. If the power cord accidently becomes unplugged it gets to 99% and zip, gone. Can you replace the batteries in these? I’ve heard you can’t but have never checked it out.

I think you can, but you might also have to change the keyboard as well which I heard could be expensive.

Check out your battery condition first: apple logo -> About this Mac -> System report -> Power (there you should see the battery condition). You might also want to look at the Service tab – pple logo -> About this Mac -> Service.

I have a mid-2015 MacBook Pro and have had 211 recharge cycles. Previous research says one can expect 300 cycles out of a battery. Previous MacBook Pro had 600 cycles and wouldn’t run more than an hour or two, fully charged. Note that partial charges are not registered until several equal a 100% charge as a cycle. I don’t do a lot of graphics but Facebook and some YouTube and some with Photos and can expect to go 2-3 days of 3-4 hrs intermittent use. Typically recharge if I’m going somewhere so I don’t have to hunt for a plug-in during the day.

When traveling getting recharged can be difficult so I have trained myself to be “battery aware”. 1) If I am thinking I hit the dim button immediately and the bright button when I actually have something to do. 2) If I start to socialize I close the lid immediately. 3) When I’m working I keep the screen as dim as is practicable then bump it up two notches when needed. 4) I keep excess windows closed. 5) I close or sleep all apps as soon as I’m finished with them – they come back up so quickly. 6) I adjust brightness for each video since some can be dimmed a lot without missing much. So, once this becomes a habit, the battery lasts much longer. This way I can write on my 13″ retina MacBook Air all the way from Auckland New Zealand to New York on one charge and still take in a movie. That’s my two cents! Cheers, Rick

I have the older MBP 13 Model since 3 years and the same model with 0.5 years of age. With the first MBP, I was able to comfortably using it for a full day. With every MAC OS X release that came out, battery life went shorter, down to 4-5 hours. When I got the “new” MBP (same model), i was expecting to have the initial battery life experience. Unfortunately, it was not much change to the MAC I used for more than 2 years already. So, battery life also depends on the OS X release

That being said, my MacBook Pro 11,3 usually gets around 7-10 hours of usage. But that’s with Bluetooth off, brightness at 50%, turbo boost disabled, and forced exclusively to the integrated intel GPU.

I own the news 15″ MBP w/TouchBar. I’ve been curious but have never tested the battery life. Activity monitor estimates 4 hours, 32 minutes on my full battery right now. I guess that’s a far cry from 10 hours. 😔

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